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Let's give Wisconsin voters some credit. While others try to find easy right-vs.-left explanations for Gov. Scott Walker's decisive victory, Badger State voters appeared to be worried less about politics than about their state's purse.

You might have seen the segment on TV recently that spotlighted a guy who had virtually no musical talent, then dived one day into the shallow end of a pool and suffered a severe head injury, and days later sat down at a piano and played it like a virtuoso.

Tobacco was an important part of life in Georgia during the thirties and forties. Every man smoked -- a pipe, cigar, or cigarette. Farmers raised tobacco as a money crop and their own use. Most women did not smoke; if they did so, they did it in private, certainly not on the street. My mother considered women who smoked to be "hussies," although she dipped snuff. I cannot remember her, in her few times of leisure, without a dip of snuff and a twig in her mouth and a spit can by her side. I certainly was not interested in becoming ...

Psychological experts are engaged in a heated debate over a curiously underappreciated issue of our times: should "narcissistic personality disorder" continue to viewed as a mental illness? Or should we concede, in my view, that mirror-kissing personalities have become not only the norm but a national passion.

Someone I met during the end of my junior year of college really showed me the difference between having a passion and an interest. Throughout my relationship with this person, I've recognized the importance and value of having interests and fueling passions.

I never knew my father; he died when I was five months old, leaving my mother with me and my 3-year-old brother. We were not his first family. He had nine children by his first wife, eight girls and one boy -- five little graves attested to the mortality rate in earlier times. Many first wives died before their husbands, not surprising since childbirth was so dangerous and the mortality rate so high. I cannot imagine having more children -- especially since my father was 63 when I was born and my mother was 40. Back then, people just had the number ...

It has been more than three years since the U.S. Senate last passed a budget. The last time Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid fulfilled his legal responsibility, Conan was still on NBC, Tea Parties hadn't come together, and the iPad hadn't yet been introduced.

Here in the Chronicle-Independent newsroom, we're kind of shaking our collective head about the news which broke Tuesday about the early-morning heist of a complete automatic teller machine (ATM) from Mid Carolina Credit Union in Lugoff. The thief or thieves apparently used a large, stolen piece of equipment to rip the ATM from its concrete base and load it into or onto some sort of vehicle, almost surely a truck, given an ATM's size and weight.

Every day, in every area of our state, hardworking South Carolina taxpayers are being robbed. They are not held up at gunpoint and their homes are not burglarized. But, they are the victims of theft just the same. Criminals are stealing federal funds and using that money for their personal benefit. They are committing fraud against the food stamp program. In fact, they pocket more than $2 million of your tax dollars every year in South Carolina alone.